Jean-Paul Rocchi

Lewis R. Gordon

The author argues that disciplines are human phenomena that produce knowledge without having to collapse into anthropomorphism. Dying disciplines turn away from reality; living disciplines reach to reality without attempting to capture, colonize, or constrain it. The author refers to the former as “disciplinary decadence,” which, he argues, is the dominant model in much of the academy. The situation need not, however, be moribund. The author outlines this concept, explores possibilities for its transcendence, particularly through resources of phenomenology from the global south, and devotes much attention to the question: Is even human transcendence, disciplinarily understood, a human relationship?

Carsten Junker

Ingo H. Warnke

This contribution discusses questions of disciplinarity with reference to the example of the person and works of Marguerite Stix. The authors debate the implications of concepts such as trans-, inter-, multi- and x-disciplinarity in a critical fashion. They connect biographical sketches with conceptual reflections on their case study, making a plea for new disciplines with specific disciplinary delineations. The article contributes to North American Literary and Cultural Studies as well as Interdisciplinary Linguistics while, simultaneously, it argues for overcoming such disciplinary ascriptions.

Carsten Junker

Ingo H. Warnke

This contribution discusses questions of disciplinarity with reference to the example of the person and works of Marguerite Stix. The authors debate the implications of concepts such as trans-, inter-, multi- and x-disciplinarity in a critical fashion. They connect biographical sketches with conceptual reflections on their case study, making a plea for new disciplines with specific disciplinary delineations. The article contributes to North American Literary and Cultural Studies as well as Interdisciplinary Linguistics while, simultaneously, it argues for overcoming such disciplinary ascriptions.

Jane Anna Gordon

This article examines how the concept of creolization, that emerged to grasp the distinctly African New World of the Caribbean, offers especially useful resources for thinking through what can and should constitute alternative forms of intellectual legitimacy and scholarly progress in transdisciplinary pursuits. It does so by revisiting Thomas Kuhn’s suggestion in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that cause and effect are often mistaken when determining which scholarly projects merit the designation as “science.” Suggesting that transdisciplinary scholarship fundamentally rejects most of the conditions that constitute normal scientific communities, it turns to the ways in which creole languages revealed the insufficiency of prior academic linguistic models by demonstrating that the multilinguistic, multiracial, and multinational region out of which they came was prototypical rather than exceptional. As with the languages themselves, the concept of creolization, when used by creative writers and social theorists alike, offered a more rigorous descriptive account of the outcomes of the larger transnational and transoceanic processes that ushered in European modernity. In ways that offer a guide to disciplines beyond the model of identitarian, sovereign territories, they drew on varieties of scholarly resources to understand how people without prior shared histories did not exist in impermeable bubbles but were remade in relation to one another. Finally, the piece asks whether the prefix “trans-,” shared in terms like transnationalism, transdisciplinarity, or transsexuality, should encourage us to consider whether the aim of calls for transdisciplinarity are for “trans” to be a temporary designation and episodic challenge or a permanent orientation.

Antje Schuhmann

This contribution explores the politics of transdisciplinarity on three interconnected levels: Firstly, transdisciplinarity as an aspect within the political economics of university management. Secondly, in relation to universities socio-political significance in transitional societies in the global South, grappling with historic legacies of violence and exclusion shaping todays socio-political complexities. Thirdly, as a crucial element of critical pedagogy in relation non-hierarchical and non-violent forms of communication and interaction assisting assist students and teachers in unlocking their individual potential, to develop critical thinking skills, a consciousness of freedom versus authoritarianism and of self-situatedness in relation to power and privilege—ultimately empowering them to be socially and politically responsive and responsible.

Rob Moore

This paper argues that the contemporary complexity of global challenges requires “connective cognition”, joined-up approaches to knowledge and innovation. These trans-disciplinary knowledge systems afford insights into complex challenges and offer prospects for remedying measures which are distilled from multiple knowledge fields and multiple locales, yielding hybrid and transcendent ways of apprehending the world. This cross-boundary collaboration enables forms of societal learning which are essentially connective and which will constitute the cognitive patterns and platforms of the future. This knowledge generation needs to be the subject of study in its own right because it is far from straightforward.

Nelson Maldonado-Torres

The decolonization of knowledge involves various forms of transdisciplinarity but not all forms of transdisciplinarity are decolonial. This article offers an analysis of decolonial transdisciplinarity in relation to the European sciences, its disciplines, and methods. It identifies a “secular-line” which combines with a “color-line” to define the context and horizon of European sciences. Ethnic Studies appear as the site of a different attitude to the one found in the European sciences and as an example of decolonial transdisciplinary thinking.

Mélanie Grué

This article compares the fixed identities resulting from the essentialist drift in research, to the multiple free identifications generated by the practice of transgressive, sadomasochist lesbianism: It cross-reads Dorothy Allison’s queer grotesque literary works, feminist, gay and lesbian studies, and subject theory, to show that the transdisciplinary approach promotes a reevaluation and reconsideration of the complexity which pertains to queer identities. Whereas traditional disciplines deny the subject’s complexity, this study argues that queer grotesque literature works contra disciplinary and identity paradigms to propose a counter-model of the human subject.